*This specific blog is a reflections on travels to Scotland and Amsterdam

*I use these scripture verses because in them I see much of myself and because my travels have enlightened their truths and accuracy of my life at this moment.

For where your treasure there your heart will be also. The eye is the lamp of the body. If your vision is clear, your whole body will be full of light.                                                                                                                                                                                                                           Matthew 6:21-22

“The human heart is the most deceitful of all things, and desperately wicked. Who really knows how bad it is?                                                                                                                                                             Jeremiah 17:9

Sometimes God has interesting ways of getting to our hearts. We store up treasure in our hearts that block us from receiving him, so he must go through the treasures in order to get to the core of our hearts. What is your treasure? For me, because of the current events in my life, I have discovered it is money. Three times I have either missed a flight or bus and was stranded in a different country and desperately tried to find my way to my new destination and consequentially wasted money in order to get there.  However through my detours, with much time to reflect, I have realized what I depend on and how I store up my treasures and disconnect myself with others. How does having money disconnect me with others? … Because if my needs are fulfilled why do I need others, but if I am in need of something it forces me to connect with others.

It all started when I arrived in Frankfurt for my flight for Edinburgh, however soon after arrival I realized I was at the wrong airport. Sub sequentially I reschedule for a 10 hour bus ride to Hamburg and a flight from there to Edinburgh. I arrive in Hamburg and carried my luggage through the five hour walk to the airport.

As I sit in a park I know nothing about, lost, I think of my security in past sins. The church bell rings, like a drone it puts my restless soul at peace.

Some other traveling set back where going from Aberfeldy back to Edinburgh were I was 25P short of my bus fare, I spend the next 3 minutes frantically asking anyone I could at the bus stop for 25P, to which one women gives me some…thank goodness.

 

Next I go from Edinburgh to Frankfurt and schedule a bus from the Frankfurt bus station to Amsterdam. I arrive at 1AM and my bus leaves at 5:45AM. It was the Saturday before Halloween so everyone was dressed up from their parties and hanging out at McDonald’s till they closed at 3AM. I walk around to keep myself from falling asleep. Long story short I miss my bus connection, at this point I think I might go mad because I had already been traveling the entire day before. I reschedule a very expensive DeutschBahn ticket to Amsterdam.

 

The city was incredible and I stayed at a Christian Hostel in the heart of the red light district. On the same street as the hostel was the atypical red light windows of almost nude women and transgender prostitutes. And then “coffeehouses” lining the streets, for your information, these places are not for coffee, they are for smoking weed. And then sex clubs and live shows so well advertised on the street.

Amsterdam has a rich history of its liberal lifestyles and legalization of prostitution of soft drugs and tolerance of some heavier drugs, this sort of way of thinking goes back to the reformation when they kicked Catholicism out of the city and nowadays most of the churches are turned into bars and museums. And not to say that the city is all bad, it is beautiful and is said to have more canals than Vienna.  The streets are filled with cars, tourists, and bicyclists. The Dutch cheese tastings were superb, the museums were phenomenal, and the canals breath-taking.

Being in a place like this, makes me weep for humanity in a new way. It makes me think of the subtly of america entertainment. The sugar coating and impressionism of sin that makes it more palatable and causes well-to-do and good men and women to be trapped to their desires by a lucrative means of medias suggestion and play on our sinful nature. However, here in Amsterdam, the expressionism of desire and sin is so abrupt and in your face, there is no suggesting or living in an intellectualized view of good and bad. It is as clear as the day and night, and I think it would be good for Americans to see it and be moved by it, to see the weight and burden of depravity for themselves so a to make their own decisions about its place in their own life, and furthermore make a more concrete decision rather than being swayed by the indecisiveness, subjectivity, and luke-warm living that plagues american society.

My third and final travel misadventure was at the Amsterdam bus station, where buses leave. I mistakenly arrived at the airport thinking the bus would leave from there, a now laughable misunderstanding. I reschedule another expensive 12 hour bus ticket with a detour to Paris for three hours. Tired and exhausted I finally call my mother to explain my week of mishaps and adventures, she prays words that only a mother can utter for encouragement.

In the semi-busy bus station sits a piano for people to play. I think to myself finally an avenue for me to process my grief for missed buses and planes and realizations of my own depraved nature and burden of sin. As I play through the melodies that have shaped my life since middle school and who many a time has comforted my wondering and troubled mind, A young women stands next to me just watching my fingers. I finish and she thanks me for playing and comments on the beauty. And in this moment every mistake made is forgotten and gratitude fills me because the most important thing is connecting with others and that is a treasure.

So, “where your treasure is, there your heart is also.” For this reason I am grateful for the mishaps, the failures, the wasted time, the wasted money, because it has lead me to the treasures that really matter and the treasures that last forever.